Quotes About Awareness

This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.

We were forecasting based on the information in front of us—WYSIATI—but the chapters we wrote first were probably easier than others, and our commitment to the project was probably then at its peak. But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "unknown unknowns.

continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.

when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

But System 2 is not merely an apologist for System 1; it also prevents many foolish thoughts and inappropriate impulses from overt expression.

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects.

Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f.

Some of us may need the security of distorted estimates to avoid paralysis. If you choose to delude yourself by accepting extreme predictions...you will do well to remain aware of your self-indulgence.

Priming effects take many forms. If the idea of EAT is currently on your mind (whether or not you are conscious of it), you will be quicker than usual to recognize the word SOUP when it is spoken in a whisper or presented in a blurry font.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behaviours than from hearing surprising facts from the behaviour of others

when the repeated words or pictures are shown so quickly that the observers never become aware of having seen them. They still end up liking the words or pictures that were presented more frequently. As should be clear by now, System 1 can respond to impressions of events of which System 2 is unaware. Indeed, the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees.

In such cases, the greatest responsibility for avoiding the planning fallacy lies with the decision makers who approve the plan. If they do not recognize the need for an outside view, they commit a planning fallacy.

Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention.

Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty. However, it is also adaptive for the initial caution

This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair—unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!

Observers are less cognitively busy and more open to information than actors.

System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives.

you should know that correcting your intuitions may complicate your life.

System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.

can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.